Thursday, January 26, 2017

There's a frustrating game that the left plays with conservatives. It's an Alinksy tactic called, "Make them live up to their values." Now, living up to one's values isn't a bad thing, but setting high standards ultimately means that you'll sometimes fall short.

The left loves to exploit these shortcomings--every Christian who falls short of perfection is a hypocrite; the social values candidate you voted for just got arrested for drunk driving. Haha, everything you believe and advocate is now discredited.

They got away with it for years, waving away the lies, hypocrisy, indiscretions, and criminal behavior from their own politicians while beating the right mercilessly with the missteps of their own. It's effective because the right always maintains a baseline of integrity not displayed by the left, as evidenced by comparing what happens to Republican politicians when they're caught in criminal behavior with what happens to Democrats. Republican voters and politicians reluctantly dump the malefactor while Democrats defend their guy and launch an offensive against those who demand accountability.

And then came along Trump, a guy just ripe for demonization by the left. I think it's fair to say that even his early supporters worried that the Democrats would successfully make him toxic to the general voting public with his boorish behavior, vulgarity, multiple bankruptcies and very public divorces.

But something strange happened. Not only did Donald Trump not care about attacks on his character, neither did anyone else. We saw this new paradigm assert itself over and over during the primary throughout repeated media predictions that this time he's gone to far and he's cooked.

This same indifference that helped Trump carry the election has continued into the early days of his administration. With it comes a refreshingly freeing state of mind. Personally, I don't feel in any way responsible for Trump, nor do I feel compelled to defend him against attack.

Good, I say. I want him to take attacks personally and deal out payback. I know I won't be the target, you will be.

"He's unpresidential! He'll destroy the integrity of the office!"

No, that's already happened. Remember, you elected a shit-talking jackass who takes selfies at state funerals when he's not giving stealth middle fingers to his opponents during debates. There is no dignity of the office, not after Clinton and Obama.

"He's a narcissist! He's got totalitarian impulses!"

Yes, he's basically a mirror version of Obama. Except now, he'll be working for what I want. The end justifies the means. You taught me that.

"A sitting president going after the media. OMG!"

Oh, like Obama trashing Rush Limbaugh and Fox News? How about when he sent his lackeys to berate news reporters for failure to flatter him at all times. Oh, and NSA spying on the press. That was pretty great, too.

"He won't show his taxes!"

Don't care. Where are Obama's college transcripts, by the way?

"He's a bully! Is this what you want? Someone who uses his power to bully other people?!!!"

And this is where everything funnels down to the very nexus of my change in attitude from "Do unto others" to "I will do unto you what you do unto me."

It's two words: Memories Pizza.

It was that moment that everything changed for me--not only the harassment, fake Yelp reviews and the death threats that forced them to temporarily close up shop--oh, that was bad enough, but the most powerful man on Earth bullying a couple of small town pizza owners from Indiana simply for expressing an opinion on a hypothetical asked of them by a reporter with a malicious agenda? That was when I snapped.

Do you remember?

It's this that sent me to a place from which I'll never return. I literally don't care what Donald Trump does because nothing he can do is worse than what they've already done.

Donald Trump isn't the bully; he only insults and abuses people in power who have attacked him. They're the fucking bullies. The left, with their smears, their witch hunts, their slanders, their insults, their riots, their violence, and their weaponizing of the federal bureaucracy.

There aren't any rules anymore because the left only applies them one way. And in doing so, they've left what once was a civil compact between the two parties in smoldering ruins.

I have no personal investment in Donald Trump. He is a tool to punish the left and roll back their ill-gotten gains, no more and no less. If he succeeds even partially in those two things, then I'll consider his election a win.

Further, I no longer have any investment in any particular political values, save one: The rules created by the left will be applied to the left as equally and punitively as they have applied them to the right. And when they beg for mercy, I'll begin to reconsider. Or maybe not. Because fuck these people.

This new philosophy has freed me of more emotional angst that I can describe. Literally nothing the left says or does matters to me anymore. I don't care about their tantrums. I don't care about their accusations. I don't care if they say Trump is lying. I don't care if Trump is lying.

They created this Frankenstein. They own it. I am free of all obligation. I will never play defense again. I will attack, attack, attack, attack using their own tactics against them until they learn their lesson.

What I will not do is let them play my values against me ever again. I don't need to prove that I'm better than them. I already know it.

There is an incredible amount of misinformation about voter fraud. Literally no one knows how much of it actually goes on. The media, who are heavily biased toward the Democrats insist that it's not a problem. This is false. We have had many elections which are decided by a few hundred, or a few thousand votes.

But the Democrats don't want to acknowledge that fraud exists because they know that they are the beneficiaries of aliens, or felons, that vote. The problem with detecting voter fraud is that we have a secret ballot - our elections are held on the "honor system."

But just last week, President Obama told a whopper at his last news conference that went almost completely unnoticed, much less criticized.

He promised he would continue to fight voter-ID laws and other measures designed to improve voting integrity. The U.S. is “the only country among advanced democracies that makes it harder to vote,” he claimed.

This is demonstrably false. All industrialized democracies — and most that are not — require voters to prove their identity before voting.

Britain was a holdout, but last month it announced that persistent examples of voter fraud will require officials to see passports or other documentation from voters in areas prone to corruption.

The real problem in our election system is that we don’t really know to what extent President Trump’s claim is true because we have an election system that is based on the honor system.

Moore said that statement, compounded with Democrats' becoming "subservient" to billionaire Tom Steyer and his climate-change-advocate allies, have opened the door for union cooperation with the White House.

“As we rediscover our confidence together –- as you renew your nation just as we renew ours –- we have the opportunity, indeed the responsibility, to renew the special relationship for this new age,” the U.K. prime minister will tell Republican lawmakers gathered in Philadelphia on Thursday, according to excerpts from her prepared remarks. “We have the opportunity to lead, together, again.”

The victims included the mother of the person being memorialized and a 12-year-old girl, according to a community activist and police.

Community activist Jedidiah Brown told reporters that "the opposition" to those attending the memorial came through an alley before opening fire on the group of mourners. He added that the mother of the person being memorialized was also among the victims, though police have not confirmed that information.

SAGINAW (WWJ/AP) – A man whose drug-related prison sentence was commuted in November by President Barack Obama has been fatally shot at a federal halfway house in Michigan after two men with assault-style rifles sought him out, police said.

Two men wearing masks went into Bannum Place in Saginaw on Monday night with plans to kill 31-year-old Damarlon Thomas, a former Saginaw gang member. Lt. David Kaiser said Thomas was shot several times by one of the men as some of the roughly two dozen people at the home were held at gunpoint.

Monday, January 23, 2017

A man who shot someone outside a speech at the University of Washington (UW) by conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos said his victim was a “white supremacist,” and police let the shooter go, even as the victim is hospitalized with life-threatening injuries.

In what appears to be a case of mistaken identity by the “anti-racism” vigilante, the shooting victim later turned out to be a supporter of Bernie Sanders.

And the University President understands ...

And the university president, Ana Mari Cauce, wrote a letter Saturday that focused not on why one of the protesters attempting to stop the speech had shot someone, but instead questioned why the college had allowed the event to be held in the first place.

Courtesy of David Maraniss' new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama's identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram'pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack's "memoir" who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama's autobiography as "a symbol of young blackness" was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather, supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people's valiant struggle against colonialism, met his actual demise when he "fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes."

But ask not for whom the drapes hang, they hang for thee: today it's curtains for Barack Obama, and curtain up for Donald Trump.

and on a fake Obama quote that Steyn made famous:

A few months back, just after the New Hampshire primary, a Canadian reader of mine — John Gross of Quebec — sent me an all-purpose stump speech for the 2008 campaign: "My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you'll join with me as we try to change it."

I thought this was so cute, I posted it on "The Corner." Whereupon one of those Internetty-type things happened, and three links and a Google search later the line was being attributed not to my correspondent but to Senator Obama, and a few weeks after that I started getting emails from reporters from Florida to Oregon asking if I could recall at which campaign stop the senator in fact uttered these words. And I'd patiently write back and explain that they're John Gross's words, and that not even Barack would be dumb enough to say such a thing in public. Yet last week his demand in his victory speech that we "come together to remake this great nation" came awful close.

That's true. Obama accepting the Democrat nomination:

This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation...

As I said at the time: If it's so "great", why do we have to "remake" it? He basically lifted John Gross' Canuck joke and reworded it with a straight face.

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Rebel reporter assaulted at Women's March — $1,000 reward to find him

Even more incredible, a photographer from the Canadian Press named Jason Franson was right there, taking pictures the whole time. But he didn’t publish any of those pictures; he didn’t support his fellow journalist. He actually pushed Sheila, too — and verbally disparaged her.

To the [Trump] boycotters, the danger is not that Donald Trump says offensive things, but rather that he refuses to acknowledge the offense. Or, put another way, the problem is not that Trump insulted Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), but that he insists Lewis be judged by the same non-racial standard as other politicians, for whom the question is “What have you done for me lately?” and not “How can we better appreciate your iconic status?”

Numero Six-o: Why are the Angry White Men classified as reactionary when the small towns of the South and Midwest have been shown to be overwhelmingly in favor of the two largest socialist programs in the history of the country—Social Security and Medicare? Their opinion of unemployment checks is mixed—they dislike the concept, but accept it in practice when their family members get laid off. Most of them are not crazy about the Tea Party or the more extreme wing of the evangelical movement, but they’re not bothered by it. Like climate change, it’s just not a priority. Obnoxious things that Donald Trump said in 2005 on a Hollywood movie set are not a priority. These people are neither Republicans nor Democrats, liberals nor conservatives—they’re “leave me alone and do your job” voters. A lot of times these people are demonized for just not caring about something you’re supposed to care about. It’s assumed they hate things that they just don’t ever allow into their family circles in the first place.

So if we’re gonna use the word “angry” as an epithet, let’s use it where it’s most appropriate. Let’s use it for the intelligentsia, the media pundits, the various movie stars who feel an urgent need to tweet their political opinions. I’ve previously talked about the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, who has apparently become so twisted with rage that he can’t write about anything except Trump. Recent columns include “No, Trump, We Can’t Just Get Along,” “Trump: Making America White Again,” “Trump’s Agents of Idiocracy,” “Patriotic Opposition to Donald Trump,” and “Trump: Madman of the Year.” The first few columns he wrote, back in May, were fairly cogent, but now the man is out of control. Charles’ friends need to do an intervention and suggest he do a column on, say, farm policy, lest his monomaniacal fixation lead to a clinical condition, the way guys who start a bodybuilding program get strung out on protein powder and PowerBars.

Charles is an Angry Black Man, but David Remnick, the very white editor of The New Yorker, also went berserk in print, calling the election a “sickening event” and a “tragedy for the American republic” that was caused by “xenophobia” and “white supremacy,” “a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.” Normally a master of the subtle nuance, Remnick went full-tilt apocalyptic with his postelection analysis, including the Angry White Men of Europe alongside the ones in this country. And he did it for a reason. “This is surely,” he said, “the way fascism can begin.”

For those of you who aren’t keeping up, The New Yorker was founded in the ’20s as a humor magazine but hasn’t said anything humorous for at least twenty years now. Still, even by its own standards of moral seriousness, the Remnick outburst was evidence of the angriest white man I’ve encountered in a while—and I’ve been in some Deep South dive bars.

Toni Morrison, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for her novels, went so far as to say that the election was motivated entirely by white men who are fearful of black people and immigrants, tying Trump voters directly to lynch mobs and psychotic racist terrorists. “On Election Day,” she wrote, “how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump.” In other words, they voted for Trump as a way to disguise their true motives—getting rid of minorities and foreigners.

They are not democrats in any sense of the word. They are geniocrats. They believe the world should be run by intellectuals and artists. The fact that it’s not has made them tone-deaf, like Hillary, and very, very angry.

“Intersectionality,” which I’ve previously referred to as “Cannibalism Among The Oppressed,” refers to the highly amusing tendency of leftist identity politics to devolve into petty pissing matches about whose group has had a shittier, more miserable history. In case you didn’t realize, the more of a historical loser you are, the more advanced and noble you are as a human being. When it comes to shuffling the Progressive Stack, straight white Christian males go to the bottom of the deck by default. But if you just happen to be a one-armed HIV+ obese transgender black lesbian with multiple personality disorder, you might as well be the second coming of Gandhi.

And ...

No matter how hard they stretch and strain to reach out to their highly fetishized Women of Color, white feminists invariably find their hands being slapped away.

They are harshly reminded that America’s original white suffragists were, by modern standards, unforgivably racist. Nonwhite feminists will tell you cool information—which I previously didn’t know—about how Elizabeth Cady Stanton lamented that “degraded black men” had been granted the vote before white women. They will alert you to the fact that white suffragist Frances Willard justified the lynching of black men in the South because she considered black dudes to be drunken perverts who couldn’t keep their dicks in their pants.

Showing zero sense of irony nor the slightest wisp of self-awareness, they will chide white females that “Black Women Are Far More Likely To Be Fatally Shot By a Man Than White Women,” but they act as if this is somehow the fault of a white supremacist society rather than the possibility that black men, you know, tend to kill their domestic partners more than white men do.

These lunatics scare the hell out of their children by telling them that Trump is going to murder them and their parents, and then they use their kids’ nightmares as “proof” that Trump is dangerous. No, cretins, your kids aren’t scared because Trump is Hitler. Your kids are scared because you keep telling them they’re going to be killed. Your little ones aren’t responding to Trump; they’re responding to you. It’s amazing that these dumbasses can remain oblivious to their role in this farce.

My childhood best friend is now a prominent Hollywood executive. I’ll leave out any specific details for reasons that will become apparent shortly. Now, this friend of mine, this big-time exec behind some of your favorite TV shows, is, of course, a leftist. We grew up together, practically next door, two Jewish kids with permissive parents, but we ended up going to different high schools, and we lost touch during our senior year, for reasons that will become apparent shortly. With the advent of Myspace in 2006, we reconnected. We’ve remained friends since, always avoiding any major political arguments.

But these are new days, new times.

About ten years ago, this fellow, who I had always taken for being gay (for reasons that will etc., etc.), adopted a child from South America. Following Trump’s victory, my old friend went batshit crazy, with posts day after day after day about how Trump and his supporters were Nazi rapists. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether Trump was going to rape his adopted daughter or deport her. One day in December, he posted a self-pitying rant about how Trump’s victory had hopelessly damaged his life because he’s the “parent of a brown child.” I’d finally had enough. It was beyond me how any parent could reduce their child to nothing more than a color. “This isn’t my child; it’s my brown child!” I flashed back to the flak Bush Sr. took in 1988 when he referred to his Mexican-American grandchildren as “little brown ones.” How times have changed. Now calling your kids “brownies” is the progressive thing to do, as long as it allows you to claim victim status following an election that didn’t go your way.

I messaged my old buddy, and I decided to make a point. A point that he, and the Cathy Ladmans of the world, and all the other leftists who find their identity in real or perceived victimhood, fail to get: that we have a choice—we always have a choice—regarding what we decide to dwell on or let go of. We can decide that we’ve become permanently damaged by something, be it a mother’s offhanded comment or a presidential election, or we can rise above whatever troubles us. Plus, as he was essentially calling all Trump voters rape fans, I thought it might be instructive to drag my ol’ pal down memory lane so that he might gain a bit of perspective.

I reminded my friend why I stopped speaking to him back in summer 1985: He had attempted to sexually assault me. He’d lured me to the back room of a store, and, well, all that matters is that I got away, despite the fact that he had a good eight-inch height advantage (something about not wanting to get raped can make even the wee-est of men hulk out). Bottom line: No (lituh-rull) butthurt occurred. I fought him off, and that was that. It was a completely insignificant moment in my life, and one that has had zero impact since then. My good friend got horny, he tried to force himself on me, I fought him off, and said good-day. End of story.

When we reconnected via Myspace, we had lunch together. I decided that if he wasn’t going to bring it up, I wouldn’t. Because why would I? To play the victim card? To glean material for a self-pitying one-man show? That would be terribly—what’s the word?—leftist of me. But here was my old friend now, ripping Trump supporters for being pro-rape, claiming he’d been traumatized by Trump’s victory, so I just had to say, “You know, you did try to sexually assault me, and not only did I let it go, but I let you let it go.” In light of his anti-Trump righteousness, I asked him if he’d care to address what happened that summer day back in ’85.

Guess who immediately got defriended!

All leftists are hypocrites; Hollywood leftists merely have a larger megaphone. And make no mistake, as awards season marches on, they’ll be screaming into it like a sonofabitch. It doesn’t bother me one bit, and you shouldn’t let it bother you, either. Because, as election ’16 so wonderfully demonstrated, ain’t nobody listening anymore.

The very day after Obama was elected in 2008, I predicted in this space that his team would steal the Senate by hook and crook (see: Al Franken); nuke the filibuster at least for judicial nominees; liberalize voting laws (or enforcement thereof) to make fraud easier while charging opponents with “vote suppression”; drum up spurious allegations of civil rights violations; punish anti-abortion protesters; enact “copious new regulations, especially environmental, to be used selectively to ensnare other conservative malcontents”; invasively use the IRS to harass conservative organizations; and tacitly encourage civil unrest in furtherance of Obamite goals.

All those predictions of course came true.

Obama and company also waged bureaucratic war against independent inspectors general; tried their hardest (even illegally) to hobble fossil fuels industries; evaded Congress’s intent by sending cash and uranium to a near-nuclear-ready Iran; fumbled and stumbled while veterans suffered virtually criminal neglect; wasted hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on projects that were not “shovel-ready” and did not create many jobs; oversaw an economy in which the workforce participation rate dropped to historically low levels while real median household income also fell and personal debt rose, and in which food stamp rolls grew to a number larger than the population of Spain; horrendously politicized the Justice Department; and saw race relations worsen for the first time in decades....

If Barack Obama knew how to slink, he would slink out of the Oval Office and completely offstage, bowed and beaten by his record of scandal and failure, as much or even more of a pariah among an American majority than Jimmy Carter was in the early 1980s.

You all have your reasons for hating America and whether or not I agree isn’t even relevant. I took an oath as did all of my brothers and sisters in uniform to defend this country against all enemies foreign AND domestic. I will always protect your rights to free speech and expression through lawful and civil protest whether or not your cause is something I believe in. However, you seem to believe revolution and violence are the answer now, and that makes you a domestic enemy of the United States I protect and serve. Do it and I’ll teach you how we make the fuckin’ green grass grow. You keep saying you want a revolution, secession, a new Civil War and the election of “Racist/sexist/homophobic/Republican/Nazi/xenophobic/dictator/Islamophobic/rich guy asshole” Donald Trump is the catalyst for you to take action and destroy every evil you perceive this country to stand for…

Friday, January 20, 2017

On April 3, Dowd said Trump "can't win a general election for all intents and purposes." ("For all intents and purposes" is what consultants add to nothing-burger statements to make them sound weighty.)

Trump won the election -- and he won it with far more electoral votes than Dowd's candidate ever got.

On May 1, Dowd said, "It's going to be a men-versus-women election, unfortunately.”

Trump won

As for Trump winning the general election, Dowd declared it "unlikely." (Based on his fantastical recollections of his own predictions, I assume he is currently claiming to have predicted Trump's win in the general election.)

In the week leading up to the election, Dowd was a whirling dervish of soothsaying on Twitter:

NOVEMBER 1

"@matthewjdowd Any expenditure of time or money by Trump in PA, VA, MI and NH is a total waste. Campaign mismanagement if they keep it up.”

Of the four states Dowd considered "a total waste" for Trump to campaign in, he won the two biggest, worth more than twice as many electoral votes as the other two combined -- and one of those he lost by only 0.3 percent.

Voter attitudes about President-elect Donald Trump have changed little since Thanksgiving, with just over half of voters continuing to give him favorable marks.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 52% of Likely U.S. Voters share a favorable opinion of Trump, with 30% who have a Very Favorable one. The president-elect is viewed unfavorably by 48%, including 37% with a Very Unfavorable view.

Thursday, January 19, 2017

Suddenly progressives, of all people, are deeply concerned about our culture’s long-held norms and traditions.

The irony in all of this is crystal clear. These are the same people who over the past few years have insisted that five-year-old boys becoming five-year-old girls is normal. They tell us that a guaranteed basic income and running for president as a Socialist is normal. Forcing Catholic hospitals to offer birth control, undocumented immigrants voting in our elections, and abolishing the police: normal, normal, and normal.

Israel deploys 'Star Wars' missile killer system

Israel's upgraded ballistic missile shield became operational on Wednesday, in a "Star Wars"-like extension of its capabilities to outer space where incoming missiles can be safely destroyed.

The Defence Ministry said the U.S.-funded Arrow 3 system, jointly developed by state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries and U.S. firm Boeing Co. , was handed over the Israeli Air Force.

The Arrow 3, together with the Arrow 2, which has been operational since 2000, would "significantly reduce the possibilities of ballistic missiles" hitting Israel, the ministry said in a statement.

The Arrow 2 is designed to intercept projectiles high and low within the atmosphere. Arrow 3 missiles will fly into space, where their warheads detach to become "kamikaze" satellites that track and slam into their targets.

President Obama began his final press conference on a surprising note. Despite “not liking all of the stories you’ve filed,” he told the gathered White House press corps, it’s you’re duty to ask “tough questions” and not be “sycophants.”

Too bad reporters were apparently not paying attention.

What followed was one softball after another, with rhetorical foot massages sandwiched between.

“Thank you, Mr. President” each reporter began.

“It’s been an honor,” said another, before literally making the "call me" expression while pointing at her cellphone.

A reporter for The Blade, Chris Johnson, used his opportunity to ask the president a question to instead list a series of LGBT “accomplishments” Obama enjoyed during his tenure — before setting the president up to attack Trump.

“On LGBT rights, we have seen a lot of achievements over the past 8 years, including signing hate crime protection legislation, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ repeal, marriage equality nationwide and ensuring transgender people feel visible and respected,” Johnson began. “How do you think LGBT rights will rank in terms of your accomplishments and your legacy? And how confident are you that Congress will endure or continue under the President-elect?”

“Are you fearful for the status of those DREAMers” under Trump, another reporter asked suggestively.

“Under your watch, people have said, you have expanded the rubber band of inclusion," another reporter began. "And with the election and the incoming administration, people are saying, the rubber band has recoiled and maybe even is broken. And I’m thinking back to a time on Air Force One going to Selma, Ala., when you said your job was to close the gaps the remain."

"What gaps still remain?" she asked. "And also, what part will you play in fixing those gaps in your new life?”

With questions like these, it's no wonder Obama doesn't want to stray too far from Washington.

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

I got news for you sunshine. You know a lot more than two Trump voters. They’re keeping quiet in your presence because you’re a fucking loon.

Trump voters are plentiful and they’re everywhere. You’ve encountered them without knowing it. They know how you think. You don’t know how they think.

Keep that in mind snowflake, you’re surrounded by people you constantly berate. They know you’ve equated their vote with murder. They know you consider them evil (though not full beheading evil). They know you would “defeat them or wait for them to die”. They move around you, past you, next to you, talk to you, interact with you, and yet every moment of that interaction they know you’re a fuse ready to be lit. They assess your level of crazy and exhibit greater self control than you can imagine.

It takes self awareness to have an opinion without dry humping everything in sight with it. It’s part of maturity. One word for it is decorum.

The NYT does not call the tune any longer. Voters get their news from a jillion sources on the Internet. The Times is a voice and a big voice. But there are a billion other voices now. And about half of the nation just does not believe Big Media any longer. They don’t buy the vicious lie that white people are all racists. They know that the Black Caucus and Black Lives Matter are real racists. They know Joe Sixpack isn’t and anyway, they don’t care.

They’re sick of being pushed around. They elected a tough guy who won’t be pushed around. He’s a shtarker and he cannot be broken in spirit by the thugs and bullies of the media.

Monday, January 16, 2017

The Diplomad finds irony in the Democrats suddenly pretending that there's a Russian under the bed.

I am deeply touched by the sudden progressive concern for the security of the United States. Most of the same people now screaming "RUSSIA!" and accusing President-elect Trump of being the Siberian Candidate, historically have opposed a strong US military, opposed efforts to fight Soviet Communism, laughed at "a Red under every bed" paranoia, derided the CIA as murderers and coup-plotters, wanted immediate US nuclear disarmament, made fun of Romney's concerns about Russia, defended Hillary's use of an insecure server, etc. Lots more, you can fill it in. They also have opposed strong US border defense, and an immigration policy to protect us from foreign jihadis, rapists, murderers, and urban criminal gangs. Obama, the ultimate political expression of the progressive world view, gutted the US military, instructed our intel and enforcement agencies to focus on "climate change," ordered them to downplay the illegal alien and jihadi threats, tried to politicize them and shape them into extensions of the DNC (see DOJ, IRS and EPA, for example). He, in sum, turned them into purveyors of the usual progressive nonsense that has gotten us into our current socio-political-economic fix, and, by the way, led to the election of Donald Trump.

The Left's problems with Russia are based largely on the fact that Russia is no longer communist. Keep in mind that the Left saw communism as the future. Bernie Sanders took his wife there on is honeymoon and many on th eLeft deplored the end of the Soviet Union.

I can't help but think that this leftist obsession with trying to undermine Trump's ability to deal with Russia is linked, at least in part, to the fact that Russia is no longer Communist. The progs liked Communism, whatever they might claim now. That Russia loudly proclaims itself a Christian power and makes no secret of its politically incorrect animosity to jihadi Islam, has won Moscow no friends among Western progs.

So what is a realistic way of dealing with the issue of Russia and Putin? This makes a lot of sense.

We can deal with Russia, as I stated before, by ensuring our own energy independence, having a reinvigorated and highly lethal military force, and showing less willingness to listen to the Europeans, who, with the exception of the British, have a remarkable track record of being wrong on almost every major issue for the past three hundred years.

And then there's the press. Nothing against Jim Acosta, who was doing his job, but Trump was right about CNN's coverage. It's biased trash. They — and the New York Times and the networks — have turned a blind eye for eight years of scandal while Obama turned Washington into a Chicago-like Democrat machine. Now, suddenly, in their hatred for Trump, they've rediscovered their journalistic testosterone and we're supposed to respect them for it? Screw 'em. As long as Trump doesn't do anything really evil like turn the IRS on his enemies or acquire journalists' phone records or persecute political opponents or scuttle FOIA requests (all of which Obama did), the First Amendment will survive a president who knows how to stand up for himself against the MSM Lie Factories.

The Clinton Foundation announced it’s laying off 22 staffers on the Clinton Global Initiative, keeping with a plan to deal with the negative spotlight put on the organization during former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The layoffs will take effect April 15, the Clinton Foundation said in a filing with the New York Department of Labor Thursday, citing the discontinuation of the Clinton Global Initiative. The move is part of a plan put in motion ahead of the presidential election in order to offset a storm of criticism regarding pay-to-play allegations during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

The layoffs were reportedly announced internally in September, ahead of Clinton’s stunning loss to President-elect Donald Trump. Many other employees had already begun looking for or accepting other jobs at that time, as it had become clear the future of the initiative was in doubt. It’s unclear how many of the once 200 strong staff might remain at the Clinton Foundation in some other capacity.

Democratic Representative John Lewis, of Georgia, said on a segment of "Meet the Press" released by NBC on Friday he thought hacking by Russians had helped Trump, a Republican, get elected in November. Lewis said he does not plan to attend Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration, the first time he would miss such an event since being elected to the House in 1986.

On Saturday Trump tweeted that Lewis had falsely complained about the election results and instead "should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested)."

Saturday, January 14, 2017

... the elite in Washington and Menlo Park appreciate the fresh grapes and arugula that they purchase at Whole Foods. Someone mined the granite used in their expensive kitchen counters and cut the timber for their hardwood floors. The fuel in their hybrid cars continues to come from refined oil. The city remains as dependent on this elemental stuff—typically produced outside the suburbs and cities—as it always was. The two Palo Altoans at Starbucks might have forgotten that their overpriced homes included two-by-fours, circuit breakers, and four-inch sewer pipes, but somebody somewhere made those things and brought them into their world.

In the twenty-first century, though, the exploitation of natural resources and the manufacturing of products are more easily outsourced than are the arts of finance, insurance, investments, higher education, entertainment, popular culture, and high technology, immaterial sectors typically pursued within metropolitan contexts and supercharged by the demands of increasingly affluent global consumers. A vast government sector, mostly urban, is likewise largely impervious to the leveling effects of a globalized economy, even as its exorbitant cost and extended regulatory reach make the outsourcing of material production more likely. Asian steel may have devastated Youngstown, but Chinese dumping had no immediate effect on the flourishing government enclaves in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia, filled with well-paid knowledge workers. Globalization, big government, and metastasizing regulations have enriched the American coasts, in other words, while damaging much of the nation’s interior.

Few major political leaders before Trump seemed to care. He hammered home the point that elites rarely experienced the negative consequences of their own ideologies. New York Times columnists celebrating a “flat” world have yet to find themselves flattened by Chinese writers willing to write for a fraction of their per-word rate. Tenured Harvard professors hymning praise to global progressive culture don’t suddenly discover their positions drawn and quartered into four part-time lecturer positions. And senators and bureaucrats in Washington face no risk of having their roles usurped by low-wage Vietnamese politicians. Trump quickly discovered that millions of Americans were irate that the costs and benefits of our new economic reality were so unevenly distributed.

As the nation became more urban and its wealth soared, the old Democratic commitment from the Roosevelt era to much of rural America—construction of water projects, rail, highways, land banks, and universities; deference to traditional values; and Grapes of Wrath–like empathy—has largely been forgotten. A confident, upbeat urban America promoted its ever more radical culture without worrying much about its effects on a mostly distant and silent small-town other. In 2008, gay marriage and women in combat were opposed, at least rhetorically, by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in their respective presidential campaigns. By 2016, mere skepticism on these issues was viewed by urban elites as reactionary ignorance. In other words, it was bad enough that rural America was getting left behind economically; adding insult to injury, elite America (which is Democrat America) openly caricatured rural citizens’ traditional views and tried to force its own values on them. Lena Dunham’s loud sexual politics and Beyoncé’s uncritical evocation of the Black Panthers resonated in blue cities and on the coasts, not in the heartland. Only in today’s bifurcated America could billion-dollar sports conglomerates fail to sense that second-string San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protests of the national anthem would turn off a sizable percentage of the National Football League’s viewing audience, which is disproportionately conservative and middle American. These cultural themes, too, Trump addressed forcefully....

Trump, the billionaire Manhattanite wheeler-dealer, made an unlikely agrarian, true; but he came across during his presidential run as a clear advocate of old-style material jobs, praising vocational training and clearly enjoying his encounters with middle-American homemakers, welders, and carpenters. Trump talked more on the campaign about those who built his hotels than those who financed them. He could point to the fact that he made stuff, unlike Clinton, who got rich without any obvious profession other than leveraging her office.

Thursday, January 12, 2017

The former British spy who allegedly compiled a 'dirty' dossier smearing Donald Trump has been revealed.

Ex-MI6 man Christopher Steele is reported to be the source of a salacious file alleging the Kremlin had compromising evidence about Mr Trump's sex life, that it planned to use to blackmail him.

Yesterday, Mr Trump called the dossier, alleged to have been handed to US Senator John McCain by a former British ambassador, 'fake' and 'phony' and Moscow has dismissed the claims as 'utter nonsense.'

Mr Steele, 52, is said to be an expert in intelligence analysis and counter-terrorism and sources say he once worked with murdered Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko.

He is now the director of a private security and investigations firm called Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd, run out of plush offices in Belgravia, central London.

The involvement of a former British intelligence officer and ambassador is embarrassing for the Government with Theresa May under pressure to reassure the President-elect that the UK had nothing to do with the 35-page briefing.

The British security services had originally tried to block UK news organisations from naming Mr Steele by issuing a D-notice, which prevents the revelation of certain information for security reasons.

Mr Steele has now fled his home in Surrey, in fear of a backlash from the Kremlin and sources say he is 'terrified for his safety'.

In recent weeks, the former spy declined requests for interviews through an intermediary, who said the subject was 'too hot', reports the Wall Street Journal.

...

Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said the timing of the allegations pointed towards an effort to smear Mr Trump just nine days before he takes over in the Oval Office.

He told MailOnline: 'The question is why has this story come out now? Everything happens for a reason. Most things happen for a reason.

'It already appears to be unravelling. Someone's released the story… I'm sure the source will be revealed in time.'

Conservative backbencher Nigel Evans told MailOnline: 'It looks like this originated at a time when somebody was trying to undermine his bid for the presidency.

'There was enough stuff that did come out, enough revelations about things that he said – some of which probably did damage his candidacy – that I would thought if there was anything there (in this dossier) it would have emerged.

'Trump is denying it. Putin is denying it. It seems to be one of these fake news things.'

Fellow MP Michael Fabricant said: 'I can well understand the President-Elect's concerns over these stories as they seek to delegitimise his election to President. There are some in the United States who would like to see a re-run of their General Election as part of an anti-Trump campaign.

>/pol/acks mailed fanfiction to anti-trump pundit Rick Wilson about trump making people piss on a bed obama slept in>he thought it was real and gave it to the CIA>the central intelligence agency of the united states of america put this in their official classified intelligence report on russian involvement in the election>donald trump and obama have both read this pol/acks fanfiction>the cia has concluded that the russian plans to blackmail trump with this story we made upjust let that sink in what we have become.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

There's a lot of undermining going on

Gerald Seib is the Wall Street Journal's Washington Bureau chief. And there resides the problem. The WSJ is generally considered "conservative" but that's because of it's influential editorial page. It's reporting from Washington is full-throat-ed Liberal.

The intelligence community’s report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election didn’t merely describe nefarious Kremlin deeds. It also put a dent in the strategic worldview that Donald Trump hoped to carry into the White House.

It’s increasingly clear that we’re living in a kind of tripolar world, populated by an America that remains the most important superpower; a rising China; and a newly re-assertive Russia trying to reclaim its seat at the big table.

And while it’s hard to read the enigmatic Mr. Trump, it also appears his vision of how to prosper in that world is to develop friendly ties with Russia on the one hand, thereby improving the American strategic position to challenge China on the other.

If that is the case, the strategic equation has been seriously undermined by the intelligence community report, which represents a consensus view of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. It not only described a concerted effort to interfere with the election, but a much broader effort to undermine the very idea of American democracy.

Leave aside the hyperbolic statement that the Russians managed to "undermine the very idea of American democracy."There's a lot of undermining going on, but it being done at the hands of the Liberal community that is refusing to hand over power to a duly elected President and Congress.

There's a lot of stupid in this column, but this jumped out at me as a classic: "And while it’s hard to read the enigmatic Mr. Trump ..."The enigmatic Mr. Trump? Are you bleeping serious?

Trump is a lot of things, but "enigmatic" is not one of them.

"Build the wall" is enigmatic? Make stuff in Mexico and I'll impose a 35% tariff on the imports Is enigmatic? "I like people who were not captured" is enigmatic? Announcing that illegal immigrants will be deported is enigmatic?

I could go on, but I have seen this accusation in other articles. I and am dumbfounded that any sane observer would call a Presidential candidate who TWEETS his thoughts enigmatic. No wonder the media never got Trump; he hits them over the head with a 2 X 4 and they wonder what happened.

So, you have your marching orders, right? The video of blacks abusing a white kid has nothing to do with virulent prejudice against whites or Trump, it has to do with Society’s prejudice against the intellectually disabled minority.

Do you understand your mission?

As you know, it is a priori impossible for Victim-Americans to abuse American-Americans. So, the victim must have been a Victim-American.

It seems that the high-status thing to believe about the Chicago torture attack is that it was really about bias against disabled people. And by the way, on Sunday, the Times published a short interview with Michael Eric Dyson, the Georgetown sociology professor and black commentator, who advocates separate fees for equal service, based on race.

The Times frames the Chicago case this way specifically for the same reason the European media initially downplayed – or ignored – stories of those mass migrant rapes:

They don’t want to give the “haters” any breathing space.

That is, to be forthright about what happened gives the alt-right types the ability to say “See, we told you so!” The Times has its own narrative and will not give this competing, conservative, “hate” narrative any air.

But it’s inevitable that the truth will emerge. In which case the alt-right types are EVEN MORE empowered, because they can both point to events, and the media’s attempt to cover them up – “fake news” indeed.

The media is utterly destroying its credibility this way, but it’s more beholden to “tolerance” than it is the truth. And this is why it will die out, because when a business model built up on reporting the truth suddenly has a new primary goal – it can’t survive.

A Parliament of Clocks

I think an old parable explains why the professional subcultures of articulate intellectuals, such as academics in the humanities, artists and journalists, all experience such enormous pressures to conform to the same viewpoint.

In the parable, a king wants to buy some clocks and travels to the Bavarian village were the ten best clockmakers in the world keep their shops all along one street.

Sunday, January 08, 2017

The left has descended not only into madness -- they've been there for a while now -- but into an exhibitionist type of Madness Theater, where they write little vignettes about themselves acting like lunatics, so that they can get attention and applause from other madmen.